Gerhard’s Harpsichord Concerto has had a decidedly chequered history. The excellent insert-note relates how the player who commissioned it made such a hash of his first two attempts at it (the first being of the initial movement only) that the composer angrily withdrew it from him; but at the first broadcast, in 1958, the next soloist (Frank Pelleg) and the orchestra got several bars out from each other in the intricate finale, and later a famous international star, appalled by the work’s difficulties (particularly of ensemble), cried off a performance at the last minute; and then, at its belated first recording (Chandos, 12/98), the balance was totally misjudged, and some of the soloist’s opening tone-row in the slow movement somehow managed to get lost. Well, thank goodness we at last have a pretty satisfactory recording of one of this century’s finest concertos for the instrument. It is not ideal: Ursula Dutschler loses the forward impetus in the tough first movement (or does a slackening of pace betoken a splice to another take?), and at about 5'45'' in, the harpsichord’s Lombard-rhythm figures, which the strings repeat, are barely audible. But detail is generally clean, the sombre mood of the nocturnal Largo is well caught, and there is a splendidly fiery intensity in the finale, in which Gerhard’s Spanish ancestry persists in breaking through his Schoenbergian style.
Albert Attenelle’s pungent attack on the earlier Piano Concerto, similarly a virtuoso work, is brilliant but too closely and too loudly recorded in relation to the orchestra: the ear is so assaulted that it loses track of the solid underlying structure. In the elegiac slow movement especially, the string writing is too subordinated to the piano’s figurations (Chandos’s recording with Geoffrey Tozer is better here): there are fleeting references to the Dies irae, and the finale, for all its frenzied Spanish dance elements (with fragments of the Folia tune appearing), contains an unmistakable sense of menace, which is vividly conveyed. Some splendid orchestral playing.
The Nonet, scored for the very unusual combination of woodwind and brass quartets plus accordion, is the latest of the present three works and the most easily approachable, by reason both of its lucid texture and of its overall cheerfulness (over which, however, the third movement casts a sinister shadow): the finale, with its skittish rhythms, sees some recrudescence of Gerhard’s Spanish roots. Here the work is given a really first-rate performance.'